The Second Station of the Waffle House
by Victoria Squalor
Summary: En route to New York to find Gold's son, Emma remembers another man she couldn't catch up with. (Charmingstiltskin family feels with a Swan Thief dagger to the heart, thanks to a tumblr anon prompt)


**A/N:** Anon prompt on tumblr regarding my headcanons for Emma and Gold's Great Bae Search. Okay, I know there are no Waffle Houses in New England, but this thing just poured out and I couldn't stop it.  
**Disclaimer:** don't own OUAT or tasty hangover food

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**The Second Station of the Waffle House**

by Victoria Squalor

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Emma hadn't wanted to pull over here, of all places, but Gold was getting far too tetchy for her to deal with at the moment—a petulant combination of low blood sugar and the man's first agitated confrontation with highway traffic congestion in three-hundred-and-god-knew-how-many-years—and Henry had consumed nothing in the last twenty-four hours except three packs of Gushers and two cans of Mountain Dew, and far be it from her to go lax on parental responsibility now, even if Regina wasn't exactly batting a thousand at the moment.

The place was much the same as the one she remembered, much the same way she imagined all of them to look on the inside. Dingy scratched countertops, waitresses with frosted pink lips and tar-coated voices, bleary-eyed truckers in mesh caps sipping coffee, tweekers with visibly trackmarked arms lucid enough at the moment to place their orders for three-egg omelets with peppers, onions, extra cheese.

Gold sat across from her, muttering random words like "chunked" and "smothered" under his breath as he perused the menu with a cocked eyebrow. "How does this stack up next to Granny's?" he inquired without looking up from the stained sheet of laminate.

Emma's mouth quirked slightly. "Well, this is unlikely to kill you, but don't go in expecting too much."

"I just want waffles," Henry announced. "With chocolate chips on top. Can I go to the bathroom now? I haven't gone in almost five hours. And Mary Marg-Grandma said in health class you get kidney infections if you hold it too long."

Emma hesitated, her mind awash with scenarios of her son walking in on some deadbeat snorting lines off the toilet seat, or worse—_God, I really am a mom now, aren't I?—_but Henry was a tough kid, and she had a gun in the car, and Gold had that giant fuckoff cane next to him, which still had a bit of Hook's dried blood flaking off the end. "All right, but you have exactly sixty seconds, starting now."

Henry took off, and Gold finally raised his eyes to hers.

"You seem unsettled," he said in that curious brogue of his, tilting his head to indicate their surroundings, the clattering of silverware on cheap ceramic plates punctuating his words. "Bad memories?"

Emma looked away, toward the direction of the bathrooms. She wasn't even counting the seconds.

"It's..." She groaned inwardly. _It's none of your business_, she wanted to say. But Gold had a way of making things his business. Like her and her son. They'd have had nothing to do with his damned earthshaking quest to turn over heaven and earth and quite possibly every rock in Central Park before they found Baelfire, had she not had a flicker of compassion for a pregnant girl once upon a time. A pregnant girl with flaxen hair and bleak prospects for the future. Which was all she'd seen every time she'd looked in the scratched mirror in her prison cell.

So she admitted defeat, again, and opened her mouth, and the words just came out.

"This was the first place I went after they let me out of prison. Well, not _this_ one. It was in Phoenix, off the I-10. Same ambiance, down to the Hell's Angels at the counter. Only the names have changed. I had twenty dollars and the address to a halfway house. I was supposed to spend the money on a cab, or bus fare. I ended up walking, in ninety-degree heat, in May. I spent the money on a T-bone steak, because I'd been fantasizing about one for eleven months, which ended up a crushing disappointment that was more akin to shoe leather. I had—" She cut herself off when the waitress sidled up to pour their coffee. It had definitely been more than sixty seconds. Oh, God, what if some sick bastard was in there trying to show his shriveled wang to her son? "I should go check on Henry."

But Gold was still watching her, trying to work her out as if she were a particularly aggravating puzzle, a thousand-piece interpretation of Monet's Water Lilies where the only sure parts were around the edges. "You had what?"

"I had..." Emma took a swig of coffee, bitter and black as tar, and grimaced. If she hadn't known better, if she believed that magic had some pull in the world outside Storybrooke's borders, she would have _sworn_ that the man was working his mojo on her right now, making her say these things she had never intended to say aloud, let alone to _him_. "I had just given birth to Henry two months earlier. I sat there, sawing at this sad piece of meat, and somewhere in the middle of feeling sorry for myself about the steak, I remembered—" _I remembered my baby, and I remembered his father. I remembered the I love yous, the jelly donuts, the sticky bits of melting Apollo bar that I licked off his lower lip and made him laugh before he pinned me to the bed. I remember the stolen bottles of hotel shampoo, the half-full bottles of bum wine that we'd share with well-meaning street kids after we decided we were lit enough for the evening._

_I remember Tallahassee. I remember sitting in the dunes, watching this little family shuffle up the beach, mom and dad and a little boy about four or five, carrying his plastic pail and shovel, and I had to duck my head when they walked by so they wouldn't see me crying._

_I remember it all, and it never fucking stops hurting, no matter how far down I push it. I looked for him, over and over. I hauled so many of those losers off to the cops. Bail-jumpers, tweekers, fencers, garden-variety derelicts, and I never found him._

_And you're never gonna find your son, either._

It all passed before her in the blink of an eye, before she could even open her mouth, before Gold could lower his eyebrow, but before any of those things happened, Henry slid into the booth beside her again. "What's wrong?" he inquired guilelessly, eyes tinged with worry.

Gold broke the silence. "Nothing at all," he said. "What do you think, Henry? Should I get the waffles?"

Emma looked back at Gold, looked back at her son, saw his father's smile, crinkling around the eyes, and took another swallow of coffee.


End file.
